TEACHING SUPPORTED EMPLOYEES WITH SEVERE MENTAL RETARDATION TO SOLVE PROBLEMS

Two individuals with severe mental retardation, employed by a janitorial supply company, were taught to use self-instruction in combination with multiple exemplar training to solve work-related problems. Use of the combined strategy resulted in generalization of the effects of independent variables, as well as generalization to nontrained problems. Use of the strategy is discussed in terms of promoting independent performance among supported employees.     

EFFECTS OF WAIT-TIME AND INTERTRIAL INTERVAL DURATIONS ON LEARNING BY CHILDREN WITH MULTIPLE HANDICAPS

We investigated the influence of teacher wait-time and intertrial interval durations on the performance of 4 multiply handicapped students during instruction in 10 skills. Four experimental conditions were evaluated: long wait-time and long intertrial interval, long wait-time and short intertrial interval, short wait-time and long intertrial interval, and short wait-time and short intertrial interval. Instructors attempted to keep short intervals as close as possible to 1 s and long intervals as close as possible to 10 s for both variables. Results showed that student performance was superior under the long wait-time conditions irrespective of the length of the intertrial interval.     

EVALUATION OF TACTILE PROMPTS WITH A STUDENT WHO IS DEAF,BLIND, AND MENTALLY RETARDED

We provided tactile cues to a student who was deaf, blind, and mentally retarded to guide her performance on a variety of packaging tasks. The student had previously received extensive training on multiple packaging and sequencing tasks through her vocational education program. Although she was able to complete these tasks, each change in materials necessitated that similar levels of retraining be conducted in order for her to perform revised tasks. Tactile cues were introduced and evaluated through a multiple baseline with sequential withdrawal design for two envelope-stuffing tasks and one bagging task. Results indicated that the tactile prompts were effective in guiding her performance on the training task and in promoting generalization to novel tasks and cues. Continued use of the cues was necessary to maintain the student's performance. Our findings suggest that tactile prompts function similarly to picture prompts and may be an effective alternative external prompting system for persons for whom picture prompts would not be appropriate.     

CLINICAL BEHAVIORAL PHARMACOLOGY: METHODS FOR EVALUATING MEDICATIONS AND CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT

We evaluated methods for comparing the effects of dextroamphetamine (Dexedrine), thioridazine (Mellaril), and contingency management in the control of severe behavior problems. A reversal design was used in which medications were systematically titrated and assessed in unstructured as well as structured settings with three clients. Subsequently, behavioral procedures including timeout, differential reinforcement of other behavior, and visual screening, were used in a multiple-baseline design across settings. The assessment and design methods were useful in comparing the interventions. Dextroamphetamine decreased inappropriate behaviors and improved academic behaviors in one client, but no reliable effects were observed in the other two clients. Thioridazine was variable across clients, settings, behaviors, and dosages. Contingency management produced consistent decreases in inappropriate behaviors and small improvements in academic performance.     

The role of observing and attention in establishing stimulus control.

Early theorists (Skinner, Spence) interpreted discrimination learning in terms of the strengthening of the response to one stimulus and its weakening to the other. But this analysis does not account for the increasing independence of the two performances as training continues or for increases in control by dimensions of a stimulus other than the one used in training. Correlation of stimuli with different densities of reinforcement produces an increase in the behavior necessary to observe them, and greater observing of and attending to the relevant stimuli may account for the increase in control by these stimuli. The observing analysis also encompasses errorless training, and the selective nature of observing explains the feature-positive effect and the relatively shallow gradients of generalization generated by negative discriminative stimuli. The effectiveness of the observing analysis in handling these special cases adds to the converging lines of evidence supporting its integrative power and thus its validity.     

SERIOUS DELINQUENT BEHAVIOR AS PART OF A SIGNIFICANTLY HANDICAPPING CONDITION: CURES AND SUPPORTIVE ENVIRONMENTS

The past 20 years have been productive ones for the field of applied behavior analysis. A brief review of our own efforts during this period reveals that we have accomplished several but not all of our goals for the Teaching-Family approach. In this context, we note that the setting of realistic and appropriate goals is important for the field and for society. Moreover, we suggest that the realistic goal for some persons with serious delinquent behavior may be extended supportive and socializing treatment rather than permanent cure from conventional short-term treatment programs. We base this suggestion on the accumulating evidence that serious delinquent behavior may often be part of a significantly disabling and durable condition that consists of multiple antisocial and dysfunctional behaviors, often runs in families, and robustly eludes effective short-term treatment. Like other significant disabilities such as retardation, autism, and blindness, the effects of this condition may be a function of an interaction of environmental and constitutional variables. We argue that our field has the wherewithal to construct effective and humane long-term supportive environments for seriously delinquent youths. In this regard, we explore the dimensions, rationales, logistics, and beginnings of a new treatment direction that involves long-term supportive family treatment. We contend that such supportive families may be able to provide long, perhaps even lifetime, socializing influences through models, values, and contingencies that seem essential for developing and maintaining prosocial behavior in these high-risk youths.     

Saying and doing: A contingency-space analysis

Correspondences between verbal responding (saying) and nonverbal responding (doing) may be organized in terms of the classes of verbal/nonverbal relations into which particular instances of verbal/nonverbal response sequences can enter. Contingency spaces, which display relations among events in terms of the probability of one event given or not given another, have been useful in analyses of nonverbal behavior. We derive a taxonomy of verbal/nonverbal behavior relations from a contingency space that takes into account two conditional probabilities: the probability of a nonverbal response given a verbal response and that probability given the absence of the verbal response. For example, positive correspondence may be said to exist as a response class when the probability of doing is high given saying but is otherwise low. Criteria for other generalized classes, including negative correspondence, follow from this analysis.     

TEACHING SOCIAL LANGUAGE TO MODERATELY HANDICAPPED STUDENTS

Three students with moderate handicaps were taught to initiate and expand on conversational topics. The teaching procedure used stimuli generated from actual conversations with nonhandicapped peers. Generalization was assessed by audiotaping conversations between the handicapped students and their peers in natural school contexts without adult supervision. Results indicated that training generalized to natural contexts. These results were socially validated by undergraduate special education students, who rated tapes of two of the students' conversations during training phases as more socially competent than during baseline. Results are discussed in terms of the evaluation of complex social behavior as multioperant behaviors.     

GENERALIZATION OF OBJECT NAMING AFTER TRAINING WITH PICTURE CARDS AND WITH OBJECTS

Generalization of four retarded children's object naming responses to stimuli in the natural environment was assessed after training with either objects or pictures of the objects. Generalization was typically greater after training with objects. In a second experiment, half of the stimuli that showed little generalization were retrained by alternating the original training object with an object that belonged to the same stimulus class as the training stimulus. The other half were simply retrained using the object. The alternating procedure resulted in substantial increases in generalization to untrained objects.     

USING REINFORCEMENT AND CUEING TO INCREASE HEALTHY SNACK FOOD CHOICES IN PRESCHOOLERS

We examined the effects of behavioral procedures to modify the food choices of preschoolers during a snack period at school (training setting) and at home (generalization setting). In the first experiment, we evaluated the usefulness of nutrition training and a generalization programming strategy of cueing to improve healthy snacking; in the second experiment we investigated the effect of nutrition training alone. In addition, three cases are presented that illustrate individualized procedures to facilitate generalization of healthy snacking to home. Results indicated that children's healthy snack choices increased in the preschool training setting, that generalization to home was achieved only when procedures to program it were implemented, and that the best results were found when the generalization procedures were tailored to the individual child.